Damn, what a shame.It sounds like a lot of things went wrong here.Hypothermia probably killed him before harness-hang.Hosobuchi appeared to be pinned by the force of rushing water, park spokesman Alyssa Baltrus said.

To be clear, in my VERY untrained medical opinion, the mechanism of injury here is completely different from what is often referred to as "harness hang syndrome".

It's not entirely clear what happened, but it sounds like he was head down in the waterfall.

So as Junkman points out, it's very likely hypothermia was the real killer. If that's not the case, it is more likely that being head down for so long increased intracranial pressure.

What we normally think of as "harness hang syndrome" is more likely due to reduced blood flow to the brain. I refer to Dr. Mortimer's piece for those who have not read it. (And if you're lucky and can hear him talk about it, all the better.)

Yeah, I guess the title I put on probably made it seem more like a death directly attributable to the harness hang. Who knows. *Maybe* the autopsy would tell. However, it does seem that there could be a lot of factors, including the harness hang affecting his ability to function enough to extract himself.

No harness hang syndrome was involved here. The man (Yoshio Hosobuchi) became stuck after his autoblock jammed in the descender. He tried to free himself by cutting the harness waistbelt, and ended up inverted in the waterfall, suspended by one foot caught in a harness leg loop. He died while hanging like that. I can't remember if there was a definitive cause of death announced.